He swept his beard to and fro with one hand.  Spinrobin already saw those holes and caverns in the terms of sound and color.

“And—­for the entire name—­when completed?” he asked, knowing that the question was but a feeble substitute for that other one he burned to ask, yet dared not allow his lips to utter.  Skale turned and looked at him.  He raised his hands aloft.  His voice boomed again as of old.

“The open sky!” he cried with enthusiasm; “the vault of heaven itself!  For no solid structure exists in the world, not even the ribs of these old hills, that could withstand the power of that—­of that eternal and terrific—­”

Spinrobin leapt to his feet.  The question swept from his lips at last like a flame.  Miriam clung to his arm, trying in vain to stop him.

“Then tell me,” he cried aloud, “tell me, you great blasphemer, whose is the Name that you seek to utter under heaven ... and tell me why it is my soul faints and is so fearfully afraid?”

Mr. Skale looked at him for a moment as a man might look at some trifling phenomenon of life that puzzled yet interested him.  But there was love in his eyes—­love, and the forgiveness of a great soul.  Spinrobin, afraid at his own audacity, met his eyes recklessly, while Miriam peered from one to the other, perplexed and questioning.

“Spinrobin,” said the clergyman at length, in a voice turned soft and tender with compassion, “the name I seek—­this awful name we may all eventually utter together, completely formed—­is one that no living man has spoken for nigh two thousand years, though all this time the search has been kept alive by a few men in every age and every country of the world.  Some few, they say—­ah, yes, ’they say’—­have found it, then instantly forgotten it again; for once pronounced it may not be retained, but goes utterly lost to the memory on the instant.  Only once, so far as we may know”—­he lowered his voice to a hushed and reverent whisper that thrilled about them in the air like the throbbing of a string—­“has it been preserved:  the Prophet of Nazareth, purer and simpler than all other men, recovered the correct utterance of the first two syllables, and swiftly—­very swiftly—­phonetically, too, of necessity,—­wrote them down before the wondrous memory had time to fade; then sewed the piece of parchment into his thigh, and hence ‘had Power’ all his life.

“It is a name,” he continued, his tone rising to something of its old thunder, “that sounds like the voice of many waters, that piles the ocean into standing heaps and makes the high hills to skip like little lambs.  It is a name the ancient Hebrews concealed, as Tetragrammaton, beneath a thousand devices, the name, they said, that ’rusheth through the universe,’ to call upon which—­that is, to utter correctly—­is to call upon that name which is far above all others that can be named—­”

He paused midway in the growing torrent of his speech and lifted his companion out of the sofa.  He set him upon his feet, holding both his hands and peering deep into his eyes—­those bewildered yet unflinching blue eyes of the little man who sought terrific adventure as an escape from insignificance—­